The secret to attracting more young people to the sector is ‘about giving them opportunities and making sure you are telling them compelling stories’.
Photograph: Alamy

Like many of his peers, Bradley Bliss had no real plan for his career after leaving school at 16. He trained to be a bricklayer and dipped his toe into the world of IT, but was still clueless about which path to pursue. The answer, however, was closer to home than he thought.

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Bliss lives with and looks after his grandmother, a care worker with more than 40 years’ experience, his grandfather, who has multiple sclerosis, and an uncle with learning disabilities and autism. On the suggestion of his grandmother, he applied for and was accepted onto Hertfordshire county council’s health and social care training programme in September 2015. He hasn’t looked back since.

Bliss began his apprenticeship at Stevenage Resource Centre, a day centre for people with disabilities, before moving to Westbourne Care Home – a residential facility in Hitchin. Bliss, now 20, enjoys the job so much that he wants to continue his training and become a day centre manager one day.

“I love making the people I care for smile,” he says. “Many of the residents don’t get many visitors and it’s nice to speak to them, get them outside and make them happy.”

Hertfordshire’s scheme began in 2005 to attract 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training into health and social care. Trainees earn £110 a week during the year-long programme and work in a variety of settings including residential care, living services and day centres. One day a week they study at North Herts college for BTec qualifications in health and social care. After completing the course, some go on to level two apprenticeships while others find jobs in the sector. An after-care programme continues to offer support once the training is over.

The scheme was a trailblazer in attracting an often hard-to-reach demographic to social care – a sector which relies heavily on apprentices. There will be between 1.8m and 2.4m available jobs (pdf) in social care by 2025 according to Skills for Care, so attracting school-leavers and graduates is essential to ensure the sector can meet the demands of an ageing workforce.

The recent decision to move the responsibility for apprenticeships from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) to the Department for Education (DfE) is hoped to bring about positive change by providing greater continuity from schools and colleges through to the workplace. The portfolios of ministers within the department are still being finalised, according to a DfE spokesperson, so it is still unclear what shape its strategy on apprenticeships will take. The department does, however, still aim to deliver three million new apprenticeship starts in England by 2020.

Paul Rainbow, senior learning and development officer in adult social care at Hertfordshire county council, is hopeful that this move will help employers form stronger partnerships with schools to promote social care as an attractive option for young people.

“It’s really tough to promote care as a career,” he says. “But we are one of the only countries in the world where you don’t have to be qualified to work in it. You can just walk straight off the street and work with minimal induction.”

Rainbow would like schools to move away from pushing university as the best route to career success, and instead talk more about other options available to young people whose best option might not be further and higher education.

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“Young people are not getting the careers advice and the support they need,” says Anita Cunningham, head of training for Anchor – a non-profit provider of housing and care for older people.

“Care, for example, has never really been on their agendas until we spoke to them directly. Through the DfE, having schools and colleges in that closer network is going to be how we bring more young people into apprenticeships.”

“We are making assumptions that young people don’t want to do certain careers, but that’s because they are 16 and don’t know about the world of work yet, and we’ve not invested the time to tell them,” Cunningham adds.

Anchor has been recruiting 16- to 24-year-olds to its apprenticeship programme, launched in June 2015, and offering roles from care to customer service by targeting young people on social media.

Current apprentices designed marketing materials to ensure the pictures and language used appealed to other young people. They also worked with professional filmmakers to create a recruitment video that provided direct insight into what it’s like to work in care. This was all shared with their peers on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

Apprentices also go into schools to give talks to students about the programme. As a result, applications have soared from just a couple of hundred for their first cohort to more than 1,000 for a new round of apprentices who will work solely in care.

Some 87% of those apprentices will go on to find jobs with Anchor. Cunningham believes this is due to the investment they make in their apprentices, such as providing ongoing advice and support during the programme and treating them as valued members of the team. During placements, for example, they are encouraged to get involved in a variety of care duties and are not obliged to do odd jobs or trivial tasks.

The secret to attracting more young people to the sector is “about giving them opportunities and making sure you are telling them compelling stories”, says Cunningham. “Going into schools with apprentices who can talk about the care they have given and the impact that has had is really powerful. It’s a myth that young people don’t want to work in the sector, as long as you give them the right opportunity.”

Beyond closer ties with education, there are hopes that the government’s new apprenticeship levy, which will start in April 2017, will encourage larger social care providers to offer more routes into the sector for school-leavers.

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Owen Mapley, director of resources at Hertfordshire county council, says: “The levy presents an opportunity to add to career pathways and offer real opportunities to enter health and social care to groups of people who may not have considered this as a career previously, while also allowing us to build a greater capacity of confident, competent workers and aid retention rates.

“While there are numerous complexities with the application of the levy that will need to be worked through in the coming months, we are actively reviewing these further opportunities and how we could work with other partners and organisations in Hertfordshire to strengthen our offer.”